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How an embattled energy storage project in Acton, California, is threatening faster federal permits.
One hour north of Los Angeles, the small town of Acton is experiencing a battery energy storage buildout — and quickly becoming the must-watch frontline in the backlash against lithium-ion energy storage systems. The flashpoint: wildfires.
Like many parts of California, Acton has hot summers with heavy winds, putting it at elevated risk of the kind blaze that makes national headlines. Battery storage fires, while rare, are a unique threat, with relatively little data available about them to help regulators or the public understand the risk. People in Acton wondered: Would they really be safe if a wildfire engulfed a battery storage site, or if a battery failure sparked a new conflagration?
When L.A. County blessed the first battery energy storage system project in Acton last year, developers and local fire officials said they were doing everything in their power to ensure the batteries would meet safety standards. Residents were far from convinced.
“This will turn our community into industrial hell and it’ll erase us from the face of the Earth,” Jacqueline Ayer, a member of Acton’s town council, told me. Ayer is helping lead the local fight against the projects.
I’ve now spent more than a month researching the fight in Acton. In the process, I’ve learned how much — or little — we know about when battery energy storage and wildfires mix. We’ll get to that later in this story. To be honest, debunking battery fire risk wasn’t why I spent a month on Acton. It was what happened when the fears took hold.
Feeling they’d been failed by both the regulatory approval process and the court system, the Acton project’s opponents turned to their representative in Washington, House Republican Mike Garcia. Though Garcia can’t do anything to stop this particular project, he can severely hinder future ones: As Heatmap can exclusively report, after lobbying from Acton, Garcia inserted language into the annual funding bill for the Department of Energy that would block it from implementing a new rule designed to expedite permits for federally funded battery projects.
“What we’re hoping is that [with Garcia] being at the federal level, he’ll shed some light to the people at the top,” said Ruthie Brock of the activist group Acton Takes Action, “because if the top becomes informed, it’ll trickle down to local governments.”
This is why the Acton fight is so important — it demonstrates the risk of failing to obtain community buy-in, which can ricochet in ways no one intended. The political and media environments are quick to sensationalize the downsides of renewable energy, creating a tinderbox atmosphere in which small local fights can quickly become national ones.
On some level, a fight over battery fires going national was inevitable. Across the country, from New York to Washington state, communities are revolting against battery energy storage sites coming to their backyards. Often, those opposed cite the feared threat of fires or explosions.
Fires in battery energy storage systems, a.k.a. BESS, are quite rare. According to what data is available, the number of fires has stayed relatively flat even as deployment has grown drastically. There were fewer than 10 failure events in the U.S. in 2023, and there have been even fewer so far this year.
But when a fire does happen, experts say it can be quite difficult to put out. In some cases, there’s nothing a community can do other than let the blaze run.
“There’s a lack of consensus. There’s a lot of experts out there providing guidance, and that’s something we’re trying to work on with training throughout the country,” Victoria Hutchinson, an engineer with the Fire Protection Research Foundation, told me. “[It’ll] instill some fear in the meantime we figure out the best approach.”
Information on BESS and wildfires is even less available. Guillermo Rein, a professor of fire science and the editor-in-chief of the journal Fire Technology, told me the matter has not really been studied.
“When I say [BESS are] new, I mean really new,” Rein said. “We hardly know how it works when it gets [on] fire and we don’t have many technologies that are proven to work. We have technologies that we wish will work, but proven technologies that work are very rare. That means we have a new hazard we are struggling to understand and in the meantime, we don’t know how to protect against it.”
Los Angeles County approved Acton’s first battery storage system — Humidor, a 300 megawatt project by Hecate Energy — last summer through an expedited “ministerial” process, the local equivalent of a “categorical exclusion” under the National Environmental Policy Act. Ministerial reviews and categorical exclusions are used by regulators to skip the drawn out process of an environmental review because they can reasonably predict a lack of significant impact. Joseph Horvath, a spokesperson for L.A. County Planning, gave me a statement defending the approval and stating BESS projects must meet all local and state zoning and fire codes to receive a ministerial approval.
California had identified the Acton community back in 2021 as a potential site for energy storage to protect against future power shut offs. Acton made sense because it’s close to the SoCal Edison Vincent substation, making it well positioned to connect to the grid. There was also a real sense of urgency: To achieve its goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, the state estimates it will need to install a projected 52,000 megawatts or more of battery storage. Humidor is the first of what appears to be multiple projects being planned for the area, including two more Hecate facilities according to materials on the company’s website.
Convinced that a battery boom could mix poorly with extreme fire risk, and that the county moved far too fast to approve Humidor, Acton residents sued. The county, they argued, had little reason to conclude the facility would have an insignificant impact on the environment — so few BESS projects have been approved that the county used the standards from a different kind of project — an electrical substation — to draw that conclusion. L.A. County Planning told me they chose this comparison for reasons including the “purpose of BESS and its connection to the larger network for distributive purposes.”
Rein told me that at least when it comes to the fire risk, this isn’t an accurate comparison, and that there’s not actually enough data to claim such a facility would have an insignificant impact. “I would put great efforts into making sure this facility is safe,” he said. “They can’t just say, I met the regulation, I did enough. Because it’s a new hazard.”
Many of those in Acton opposed to the project believe the approval was rushed, and claim that little information was made available to the public as it was going through the county’s process. Furious residents have told county planners that the Acton town council was not notified in advance that an approval was on its way. They testified before the county board of supervisors that Hecate held only a single public meeting to discuss what it intended to build, with little notice given to potentially concerned citizens.
In my experience as a journalist reporting on large energy projects with serious community impacts, transparency is key to getting local buy-in to build a project. For years I covered the mining industry, where innumerable decades of toxic waste spills and labor scandals have forced companies to really innovate and spend serious dough on obtaining “social license to operate,” a term developers and investors use to describe acceptance to a company’s business practices.
This, of course, differs from the YIMBY school of thought that companies and governments should eschew frustrated municipalities to pursue the overriding net good of climate action. There are certainly merits to this argument, especially when it comes to communities that won’t take yes for an answer, and we’ll be exploring case studies supporting that view in future editions of The Fight.
I’m on the fence about whether Acton is one of those cases, though. Ayer, an environmental engineer by trade, told me she supports decarbonization and wants to see climate action happen. She just wants to feel assured the technology is safe.
If it wasn’t a lithium-ion battery storage facility “I would feel comfortable,” she said. “We will shoulder some of the weight. But it isn’t right that we shoulder all of the weight.”
When I tried to talk to Hecate about Acton’s wildfire concerns and how the company had engaged with the community, a company spokesperson, Bobby Howard, declined to make anyone available for an interview citing “ongoing litigation related to the subject.” Howard provided a factbook that said only that Humidor would “meet or exceed” local and state fire codes — without specifying which codes — and detailed some of the outreach the company did, including the public meeting as well as mailers to “thousands of individuals throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including civically engaged individuals throughout Acton.”
Howard declined to answer questions requesting more information about the company’s public outreach and wildfire planning. He did tell the Los Angeles Times earlier this year that Humidor would have “seismic bracing, safety zones around the perimeter, substantial setbacks from parcel boundaries, gravel breaks and a masonry wall around the facility.”
Stanford University senior research scholar and legal energy expert Michael Wara explained to me that in cases like these, having buy-in from the community is important to avoiding litigation and social blowback. “That is losing,” Wara said. “You have not served your client if you end up in litigation.”
“Having a process by which people are informed about a project and have an opportunity to provide input is important for buy-in for all kinds of projects related to the energy transition if you want to build in a democratic society,” he said. “Is it really the fire risk the community is concerned about?”
When it comes to the Acton battery fight, it’s the fears of fire that scare me the most, not the fire itself.
I sought reasons to be optimistic about putting battery energy storage in areas like Acton that are prone to wildfire because, well, California is essentially one big fire risk zone. James Campbell, a wildfire policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, told me that battery energy storage decreases net wildfire risk compared to gas storage tanks and pipelines. “If we consider the whole-climate trade-offs, battery systems are much safer,” he said.
On its end, Hecate claimed in a letter to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors that a BESS fire has never traveled off-site, and that because the fires are fueled by flammable gasses, there is minimal risk of embers traveling elsewhere and igniting grass or bushes. The company pointed me to this letter when I reached out for comment.
“Nothing about fire risk mitigation is about certainty. It’s more, risk mitigation and fire is kind of like wearing a seatbelt,” Wara told me. “If you’re going 120 miles an hour down the highway and you get in a high-speed collision, your seatbelt will not save you. [But] there’s rapid advances in how these systems work.”
In the end, he added, meeting California’s carbon emissions targets will “probably mean building somewhere that there is non-trivial wildfire risk.”
What’s happening to offshore wind should be a cautionary tale for developers considering whether sinking time and money into community relations is really worth it: Last year, coastal fishermen and beach town mayors in New Jersey joined forces with fossil fuel funding and right-wing agitators to foment a conspiracy-infused campaign against offshore wind that has truly rattled the future of the industry.
Part of that offshore wind backlash grew out of New Jersey Republicans in Congress using the pulpit of their offices and filing amendments to legislation. As Garcia takes up Acton’s cause, I do wonder whether battery energy storage might be next. November’s election makes it less likely his language hindering expedited approvals for BESS projects will make it into the final funding bill, and Garcia’s office did not respond to requests to discuss its prospects.
But regardless, it’s an ember that could become a fire of its own.
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.